Returning Native History: Portland Metro Area Signs

Dairy Creek sign

In the past 2 years, I have worked on signage projects in the Portland area for agencies of the city or state. In 2025, I consulted on a sign for the Dairy Creek project on Sauvie Island. Over the period of several months, I met with people in the West Multnomah Soils and water Conservation district to produce an interpretive sign that would capture the native wildlife of the creek and emphasize the Native American inhabitants of Sauvie island.

The Multnomah peoples were removed from the area in 1856 to be resettled to the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation after spending some months in 1855 at the temporary encampment/reserve at Milton near the island. Since 1856 Farmers have been changing the land for agriculture, destroying the natural character of the land and waters.

The creek labelled “Dairy” creek likely got its name from a dairy on the Island, and we know that the dairy history begins with the Hudson’s Bay Company, fur traders, from Fort Vancouver, who placed a dairy on the Island in the 1820s. The creek has always been an ever flowing stream and the center of the Island is named Sturgeon lake for its reputation of having sturgeon. The Lewis and Clark expedition collected this history in 1806 when they travelled through the area and stopped nearby, they noted that the Indians hunted sturgeon in the local waters in the wintertime, in lakes and ponds that had lots of wapato.

Some other signs on the island highlight its wildlife

The Island is known as a wapato haven, with some 9-11 varieties documented growing there-of the 11 varieties known to live in Oregon. In fact for local tribes, it may have been wapato that attracted them to live in this location, more than chinook salmon, due to the plentifulness of the bulb food in the area of Portland and Vancouver. Trade of wapato may have been their bread and butter in the Fall and Winter, and these people do not seem to have moved far from their homes in seasonal migrations. This is unlike the upriver Cascades Watlala who would move whole villages, houses included, from Cascade Rapids to the riverbank between the Willamette and the Sandy (east Portland) and back each year. This was also witnessed by Lewis and Clark.

 

In recent history the Grand Ronde tribe has begun to look into wapato restoration at Sauvie Island, testing tubers for pollutants (it’s known that wapato can store lead, and lead shot is used in duck hunting) and working with county, city and state actors to restore the wapato fields. Outside of Portland metro area, Wapato Lake is also being restored, and there are projects at Lake Labish and Minto-Brown Island Park as well. The island is very culturally important to the tribe for the Multnomah Tribal history, and for its recently found history of an acorn processing industry, and generally for its archaeological sites.

With this all in mind I took the task of writing up the sign for the water district and here is the finished product. A press release essay about the finish project is here.

Johnson Creek Watershed Interpretive Project

In another project, the Johnson Creek Watershed Project, began in 2023, I was asked to review and edit several signs. My recent (2022) project to document the tribes at the Clackamas for METRO has gotten some attention, and the city park program asked for a report on Johnson Creek (2024), where I drew on previous reports and interpreted new information.  Particularly important I accessed this Clackamas story from Clackamas Texts.

77. Summer in the mountains; We used to go to the mountains, my mother’s brother, my mother, mother’s mother, (and) my uncle’s wife, Two cousins (who accompanied us too) were small. My mother’s brother hunted. The following morning we were still sleeping when he returned, he had brought a deer. Then his wife butchered it. Then smoke dried the meat. Now his wife at once placed the hide in the water (in order to remove the hair). Then we went, we picked blackberries, we got back. Now in the evening my mothers mother boiled them then. When they were done, then she took them out (poured off the juice). Now she made round-flat-berry-dough cakes (about two fifths of an inch thick). Then a large (long wide chunk of fir) bark (that was) clean (because the rotten and sticky material termed wa’cqcq had been removed) and there she placed it (the chunk of bark) beside the fire (and she laid his berry cakes to dry on this smooth and clean bark). When the sun rose then they (the berry cakes) were completely dry. Now she scattered the (the cakes) about in the sunlight. We dried lots of things. Now they smoke-dried meat. Also (they made) a lot of buckskins. We remained there a long time before we came back home. Then they were (some of) the things that we ate during wintertime. (Jacobs Clackamas Texts, 1958-1959, 489-490)

Now this history is significant because the tribes of the Clackamas were well known for fishing on the river and at Willamette Falls. But for these people to take time from the river to venture into the interior is important. But where did they travel to? Clearly into the Mt. Hood wilderness, but where else? It was actually a common annual event for most peoples in this area, to travel inland off their river villages to pick berries, and hunt in the upland forests.

It turns out- It’s really not that far to travel overland to the Sandy or even the Columbia. Lewis and Clark records this as well. And we know many of the original territorial roads were Indian trails. All of these trails that crossed the Clackamas pennisula, encounter the Johnson Creek watershed.

 

Well tribes like the Clackamas and Cascades, who were on two sides of this peninsula were interrelated, intermarried. They would seasonally travel back and forth across the land and likely visit relatives, before turning around and traveling back home, In the meantime, they would stop for a week or two and hunt, dig roots to gather foods, or fish at Johnson Creek. Or just spend all of their weeks inland gathering foods and such-like the oral accounts suggests. At Johnson Creek there is an old timer settler story of there being a fishing rock, something destroyed when they (Army Corps?)  stabilized and renovated the creek nearly a century ago. But much of this history is on their sign, now erected at the creek. There is a restoration project planned for 2031 at the creek-assumedly to return salmon there. The signs are below.

Note the center annual seasonal round. The city planners wanted this on the sign, the colors denote the seasons and the plants and fish are noted in the correct season, this was inspired by other seasonal round images including those I have drafted in my reports. Mine are just very crude, I like the flow of their image. We also superimposed the graphic over the map of the peninsula, showing important place names to orient the reader, but these are the places the tribes traveled to.

 

These projects are part of a larger strategy to bring native history back to the land. While you may be aware that native peoples were removed, our names and history of living on the land were also erased through the mis-writing of histories for generations. I am happy to help bring this vital history back for the people of Oregon.